Capturing the world through photography, video and multimedia

Southern California natives Phil Dalhauser, left, and Todd Rogers are photographed on the courts of East Beach Park, in Santa Barbara. The duo will be looking to repeat their gold-medal winning performance in Beijing at the London Olympic Games.

San Francisco native Alexander Massialas, seen here outside the Anaheim Convention Center, will compete in fencing at the London Olympics. Massialas's father, Greg, a two-time Olympian in fencing, will join him as a coach in London.

American rowers (from left to right) Scott Gault, Charlie Cole, Henrik Rummel and Glenn Ochal stand tall in front of Otay Lake at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista. The team will look to win gold in the men's four rowing competition at the London Olympic Games.

2012 Olympians

For nearly four weeks in June and July, I drove around Southern California — with a quick jaunt to the Phoenix area — shooting portraits of athletes who would be competing in the 2012 London Olympics. I photographed them not only in color with my digital SLR cameras, but also in black and white, using a 4-by-5-inch field camera and a 100-plus-year-old Petzval lens. Each black-and-white portrait was exposed onto black-and-white photographic paper, processed in a darkroom and scanned into a computer. You can see both sets of portraits here and in the Los Angeles Times’ 2012 London Olympics section.

The process was cumbersome and filled with experimentation. I brought 23 film holders to every shoot, in addition to a bulky camera and tripod and two digital cameras and lenses. But shooting the large-format film was a relaxing and, most important, creatively rejuvenating experience. With no motor drive to capture three frames every second (as with my Canon 5d Mark II cameras), I was forced to slow down and think about each frame.

I was reminded of the creative serendipity that comes with shooting film: I couldn’t look at the back of the camera and see what had just happened when I took that picture! It’s a habit we’ve all become accustomed to with digital photography, and though there are obvious downsides to not seeing if your timing and composition were precise, I enjoyed the challenge and reveled in the “mistakes” that happened along the way.

Once a shoot was completed, the processing work began at home, with the conversion of my bathroom into a darkroom. Trays for developer, stop, fix and wash were spread out around the sink, and I blacked out my window and door with garbage bags and tape. By the illumination of a small safelight, I was reminded of my high school days, when I first went into a darkroom and watched a black-and-white image slowly appear in the chemistry.

After drying all the pictures, I would take my favorites to the office and scan them into the computer. The scanner often added to the image, picking up lines and other unseen details in the paper negative.

In the end, some frames don’t have the best exposure, or are not the sharpest picture I’ve ever made, but there is always one that stands out and becomes my favorite because of its imperfections.

13 Comments

ha! Grace, it is more the result of hand-processing the prints… i had small trays (5×7) and using tongs became a ridiculous idea in such a small space! some prints had fix stains, some had fingerprints… it was a very fun creative process!

[…] position of using remote controlled cameras for those hard to get shots. But one photographer has gone in a totally opposite direction, using an ancient piece of gear to capture breath-taking photographs of the Olympians. The LA […]